Short answer: Franchise films (sequels, reboots, remakes, spinoffs) account for roughly 20% of wide-release titles but capture approximately 66% of total box office dollars in the U.S. market (2000-2025).
Key findings
- ~5,000 films classified as franchise or original among wide releases (500+ peak theaters)
- Three-tier classification: hand-coded overrides (~600 films), regex franchise-family matching (~50 families), and sequel-number catch-all
- Franchise share of titles and dollars tracked annually from 2000 to 2025
- Dollar concentration far exceeds title concentration, indicating franchise films dramatically outperform originals on average
- Enriched with IMDb metadata, budget, MPAA rating, and source material data
Publication
CPRF Substack explainer series (8 chapters).